In Ethiopia with a Mule (22 page)

Standing up, I started to move towards Jock – and at once the four
surrounded
me. The laymen were holding their
dulas
rather obviously, no one was smiling any more and I could feel myself going white. As he spoke shrilly to his companions, the priest’s eyes were bright with greed; he used his cross to gesture towards me – and then towards the lake. Immediately an argument started, the stocky youth supporting the priest, the slim youth siding with the older man. I lit a cigarette.

During those brief, long moments I was reacting on two levels, for beneath the seething terror was a strange, indifferent acceptance – a feeling that gamblers can’t always win and that if this was it, it was it.

The argument only lasted for the length of a nervously smoked cigarette, but before it ended I had an odd experience – so unfamiliar that it is difficult to describe, yet so real that it cannot honestly be omitted. While the priest was shaking his fly-whisk angrily in the older man’s face, and before it was possible to judge who was winning, I suddenly knew that I was safe – as surely as if a platoon of police had appeared to rescue me. For an instant I was aware of being protected by some mysterious power; and to a person without definite religious convictions this was almost as great a shock as the unpleasant encounter itself.

A moment later the argument was over. The older man ran to Jock, took up the halter and turned towards the compound. The priest caught me by the arm – he was smiling again, though his eyes remained angry – and pointed after Jock, while the youths stood close behind us. But now I, too, was getting angry. Eluding the priest’s grasp I pursued Jock, grabbed the halter and waved my
dula
threateningly. At this stage my fear was of being injured, which is quite a different sensation to the fear of death and doesn’t deter one from trying to defend one’s possessions. However, my ridiculous
dula
-waving was ignored. Within seconds the four were around us again, the youths had seized my arms and the men were unloading Jock.

They took my sleeping-bag, torch, spare Biros, matches, camera, insecticides, medicines (including a packet of Tampax, which amused me even at the time), two books (
Ethiopian Birds
and W. E. Carr’s
Poetry of the Middle Ages
), Jock’s bridle and a hundred and twenty Ethiopian dollars – about eighteen pounds sterling. My Huskies went unnoticed, being wrapped in the old pack-saddle, and neither cigarettes nor
faranj
food interested them, though these must be saleable commodities in Gondar. However, their oddest omissions were my watch (which I wear on my wrist, though in Makalle I was advised to carry it in my pocket lest it should tempt thieves) and Jock himself, who is worth another hundred dollars. Possibly they considered that in this region, where mules are uncommon, he would be an imprudently conspicuous acquisition if his owner were still alive.

When the quartet left us my knees suddenly went soggy, and as I began to reload Jock my hands were so shaky that I could scarcely tie the ropes. However, this was no time or place for indulging in the tremors – I wanted to be far away from that priest by sunset.

My topographical problem was still unsolved, but now I gave up bothering about the finer points of the compass and turned north. We climbed a high hill, pushing through leafless grey scrub, and from the crest I was overlooking a plain that appeared to be covered in tall jungle grass. It extended north for an
indefinite
distance, but was bounded to the west by a long, low ridge that looked no more than three miles away. On this ridge clumps of trees stood out against the sky, promising settlements and, presumably, safety.

Twenty minutes later I had discovered that the ‘grassy plain’ was a peculiarly hellish semi-swamp. Apart from patches of black mud, in which we occasionally sank to our knees, the vegetation was diabolical. Thick, wiry grass grew
shoulder
-high, the stiff, dense reeds were seven to nine feet tall, and a slim, five-foot growth, which looked dead, had such powerfully resilient thorny branches that I soon began to imagine it was deliberately thwarting me. From amidst these mingled horrors I could no longer see the ridge – or anything but an infinity of reed-tops and a darkening sky. Nor was it possible to steer straight, for we had to go where the ground was least swampy and the growth least
obstructive
– though whichever way I turned I was lacerated again and again by that nightmare thorny plant, and by a weird kind of thistle that now appeared to complete my demoralisation. As the light faded I cursed myself for not having turned back. This inferno was a real danger that could have been avoided, whereas murderous humans were merely contingent dangers.

By seven o’clock it was dark. I remembered that pythons are reputed to live here and was suitably depressed; this seemed my day for meeting a python. Then the vegetation ahead thinned – usually a sign of a swampy patch – and I poked cautiously at the ground with my
dula
. As there wasn’t any ground, swampy or otherwise, I stepped aside into the reeds on my left. Unfortunately there wasn’t any ground there either, so I fell into a hole six or seven feet deep. It contained glutinous black mud, too thin to stand on and too thick to swim in, and its vertical, slippery sides were unclimbable; but for Jock’s intelligent reaction I would not now be reporting the occurrence. Instinctively I had held on to the halter and steadfastly Jock stood braced on the brink of the hole – instead of bolting, as many a lesser mule would have done when their owner abruptly vanished. So I felt only a momentary panic, for I quickly realised that all would be well if the halter didn’t snap. Luckily mules are tough and the incomparable Jock showed no resentment as I hauled myself on to dry ground – though his ears and jawbones must have been taking at least half my weight.

I then decided that enough was enough and fumblingly unloaded Jock. A cautious starlight survey of our immediate surroundings revealed a
bewildering
number of deep, narrow channels, filled with mud or water – so if I lit an anti-animal fire amidst this density of dry growth we might soon have to choose between roasting and drowning.

Sitting dismally on a spot that I had partly cleared of the more dire vegetation I ate immoderately to cheer myself up. Apart from the advisability of guarding Jock I was too cold to sleep without my flea-bag, for a chill breeze had been blowing off the lake since sunset. In this situation there was an extraordinary incongruity about the prosaic little evening routine of winding my watch.

At 2.15 the waning moon rose – but by then I had been in misery for so long that the beauty of moonlight didn’t help. Reeds shaken by the wind now looked as though they were being shaken by advancing hyenas or leopards, and this new, calm lustre seemed to emphasise the lifeless silence of the marsh. Jock had at last stopped munching the short grass that flourished beneath the other growths, and there were no cicadas, or bird-stirrings, or distant dog-barks – nothing but the whispering rustle of the reeds. To pass the time I began to scrape the dried mud off my body, but when I realised that it was keeping me warm I desisted.

Three and a half hours later the first light released us. I then saw that in the darkness we had crossed a natural bridge of solid ground and become trapped on what was almost an islet. Retracing our steps we resumed the struggle and, after sitting tensely for nine and a half hours, to be moving again was such bliss that neither slime nor thorns seemed to matter any more.

An hour later the vegetation began to thin and soon we were on
ploughland
at the foot of the ridge. A broad path led down towards the lake and as we followed it a young man came towards us, driving a few cattle. He took one look at me, yelled in terror and fled. No doubt I’ve now given birth to a myth – the Dawn Devil of Tana.

It took fifty minutes to wash the adhesive black mud out of my clothes and hair and off my body, and innumerable scratches began to bleed afresh as I removed their mud plaster. When we had climbed the ridge I found a clear westward track which we followed for four hours across hilly farmland, with the lake sparkling below on our left. There were many settlements, but the locals seemed unfriendly. One little man of about fifty – dressed in a ragged bush-shirt and cotton shorts – made a miscalculation when he saw the lone
faranj
. Standing before me on the path he grabbed my
dula
and tried swiftly to pick my pockets – in full view of three leering youths who were sitting under a tree. However, in
populated areas one can afford to be aggressive and this morning my mood was not sunny: I punched him in the eye, wrested my
dula
from him and brought it down hard on his skull. As he reeled away I further relieved my feelings by throwing a stone at the youths and shouting ‘
Hid
!’

By midday my body and mind were limp with exhaustion. Ahead I could see blue-gums and soon we were in Delghie, a market town of many tin roofs on the west shore of the lake. I rested in a
talla-beit
for two hours and had a large meal of
injara
and
wat
and five pints. As we set off again, through the hot afternoon glare, I felt slightly drunk and much restored.

Our track ran close to the lake for three miles; vast herds of sleek cattle were grazing on the lush pastures of the shore and for a time we joined a dour family going home from the market. Then the track turned inland, became a faint path and switch-backed for three hours over a series of steep, thinly-forested hills where I saw only two distant settlements and a few small fields.

By sunset we had covered twenty-two miles, and though the lake was invisible all afternoon we are now overlooking it again, for these compounds stand on a clifftop high above the water. The locals welcomed me kindly, but the poverty and ill-health of this family are most depressing. My skinny,
sunken-eyed
hostess has recently had malaria, her haggard husband coughs incessantly, their five pot-bellied children have trachoma and boils, and a young man lying in a corner by the door has a gruesomely injured eye into which he frequently squeezes drops from a phial of penicillin marked ‘For Intra-muscular Injection Only’. Worst of all is the condition of the youngest child, a girl of about two; her feet and calves are covered in ulcerated burns and the poor little mite never stops screaming. Yet when I told her mother that she should be taken to Gondar hospital
at once
I got the impression that no one considered her cure worth such a long journey.

The walls of this tiny
tukul
are flimsy and already the night air is cold; so despite my exhaustion I foresee getting very little sleep.

By now I feel like a shipwrecked nonagenarian. I was being optimistic when I foresaw ‘getting very little sleep’. For the second successive night I got
no
sleep – a personal record which I would prefer not to have achieved. Possibly because of my exhaustion I felt the cold even more last night, and in that overcrowded hovel I had no room to move a finger. Fleas tickled and pricked relentlessly and bugs swarmed over me, inducing that peculiar, feverish irritation which cannot be
imagined by those who have never experienced it. The unfortunate burnt child never stopped whimpering, my host never stopped coughing, the injured young man never stopped moaning and the local dogs never stopped barking. Rats raced all over everyone and two donkeys who ‘live in’ kicked me three times. At midnight I crawled out to the starlight, broken in spirit and shivering in body. I found a little pile of straw and burrowed under it, but it was too little to warm me – and anyway I’d brought the bugs with me in my clothes.

As I sat chain-smoking the moon rose over Lake Tana and lost itself in a drift of thin cloud that glowed above the water like a length of torn satin. Being deprived of any sleep for such an unnatural period strangely distorts one’s sense of time. It would seem logical to feel that one has lived
longer
; instead, towards dawn, I found that having twice failed to cross the normal frontier between
consciousness
and unconsciousness I was aware of the past forty-eight hours as only one long day.

Not surprisingly we covered less than sixteen miles today. During the morning our path wound through sweeps of jungle grass that shone like bright copper, and on either side low ridges were covered in vivid green shrubs, and sometimes Lake Tana’s blueness glinted between the hills.

At midday we came to a village where the marketplace was crowded – though all morning we had been walking through uninhabited country – and when I told my robber story in a
talla-beit
this ill-treatment of a
faranj
roused
everyone
’s indignation, sympathy and generosity. The Medical Officer invited me to lunch and, though he is the poorly-paid father of nine children, he wanted to present me with five dollars and a blanket. His fair-skinned wife has a sweet, oval face and large, brilliant eyes; she is the same age as myself but looks ten years younger. At first she was very shy of me, but soon she relaxed, went to the iron bed and carefully opened an enormous bundle of clean blankets – to show off Number Nine, aged three weeks.

I would have liked to accept my host’s invitation to stay, but now I’m in a hurry to get to the telephone at Bahar Dar, since it is just possible that the Gondar Police may be able to recover my irreplacable high-altitude sleeping-bag, which I bought from a Japanese Himalayan expedition in Nepal.

When I left this kind family I discovered that extreme tiredness leaves one
abnormally
vulnerable to
talla
. Beyond the village I found myself swaying and stumbling across rough ploughland and the landscape went unnoticed. I felt sick and drunk and horrible as I hung on to Jock’s halter with one hand and leant heavily on my
dula
with the other. Inevitably we got lost, but that has proved a blessing. This little
town is one of Lake Tana’s chief ports, from where grain and coffee are shipped on small steamers and huge, unwieldy reed rafts to Gorgora and Bahar Dar; therefore it has some uncommon amenities, including one tin of insecticide which almost reduced me to tears of relief when I saw it beside my bed.